


The Purest Capture

by MadameDeBergerac



Category: The Last Unicorn - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, Hope vs. Despair, Obsession, Pre-Canon, References to Depression, Suicidal Thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-26
Updated: 2019-10-26
Packaged: 2021-01-03 11:18:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,053
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21178541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MadameDeBergerac/pseuds/MadameDeBergerac
Summary: " If he forgot everything else, if he forgot his own name, he would not forget the unicorns and the joy they had brought him.  And he would feel that same joy again, if it was the last thing he did."  How King Haggard came to imprison creatures of magic in increasingly vain attempts to escape his own mental prison...





	The Purest Capture

With the exception of “It does not make me happy,” the phrase most spoken by King Haggard was “I cannot remember.” Almost every time it was uttered, Lir would roll his eyes, and Mabruk would smile as patronizingly as he would to an absentminded child. But it was true. Try as he might, Haggard could not remember most things. Not the day of his coronation, not the day his kingdom first began to wither, the day he’d ceased to be Lir’s father. Not even the most mundane things, like how long he’d sat in his sepulchral throne room without eating or sleeping, or proclamations and insignificant observations he’d made the day prior. He could not remember having been young at all; it was as though he’d come into the world the same bitter old man he was now. His parents were simply blank, but stern faces in his mind’s eye, occasionally accompanied by a deep voice or a certain scent that would fade into mist the moment he became aware of them.

And he couldn’t remember ever having been happy. Such a small thing, insignificant and petty. And completely nonsensical—one can’t miss something one has never experienced. Yet if Haggard were capable of feeling—as he’d long ago suspected he was not—it would burn within him. But nothing within Haggard was capable of burning, not even the briefest cinder of emotion. Nothing in this world prompted any emotion from him anymore, not pleasure, not even hatred. It went beyond boredom, but it wasn’t quite sorrow. Sorrow was capable of being felt, like a sharp lance of shining silver tears through the soul. Haggard was simply numb. If anything, he supposed he could feel fear. Was that fear, that momentary niggling dread that would freeze his lungs if he sat too long alone, suddenly very aware of his own shortness of breath and faint, but insistent heartbeat? A sense that any moment he might dissolve and be carried away on the wind like so much ash? Yes, one might call that a kind of fear. But he learned to master that fear, to wrestle it into submission as one might a bloodthirsty beast.

And so Haggard endured for years unnumbered.

It had to have been many years indeed when he first faced the Red Bull. He knew because his grip on his sword was not as steady as it had once been; he nearly dropped it several times. Standing before that unearthly monster, its hellish eyes nearly blinding him, its heavy breath choked with the smell of brimstone, Haggard almost felt that fear again. But if he could master himself, he could certainly master this mere animal, unearthly or no. They battled for nearly a day, the Bull tossing him about with its massive horns and Haggard delivering answering blows with his sword, before, bloodied and bruised, the king emerged victorious. The Red Bull became his prize, chained in the deepest tunnel of his castle cellar, where it roared incessantly night after night afterward, begging to be released. Haggard passed those nights sleeplessly, waiting for the beast to stop its bellowing. A few times, he considered putting it out of its misery, a thought which the Bull might have sensed because thereafter it was quiet, only a vague rumble and tremor betraying its presence. There were days he would almost forget its presence, upon which thought, for reasons he couldn’t quite understand, he would descend to where it was chained and stand before it. That was all he would do—just stand, inches out of its reach, staring into those fathomless red eyes, not sure what he was looking for there. He always saw the same thing: pure, seething hatred…over time mitigated by a sullen sort of respect for its captor. That grudging respect grew in its eyes until a day came when man and monster could look on each other as equals.

It did not make him happy, but for a while he enjoyed the company. Quite ironic, all things considered—a witch had warned him when he’d first built his castle that he was inviting a curse upon his rule. Was this what she meant, he wondered—that the closest to a kindred spirit this coldhearted old king would find was some hellspawn behemoth he’d bound beneath the very floor he walked on? The notion was a ridiculous one (honestly, even the most moonstruck witches’ prophecies were more plausible than that), but curious all the same.

So remained his routine for another interminable stretch of time, until fate ordained that he would grow weary of it and be out on a “diplomatic outing” that fateful day. “Diplomatic”, he called it within earshot of the people of Hagsgate, but it was really nothing of the kind. These outings consisted mainly of the peasants complaining at him about the state of their fields, their livestock, their drafty houses. Their lot was really no worse than any poor village in his kingdom, but it was no secret that Hagsgate’s favorite pastime was blaming all of their problems on him. If the milk curdled, if the horses became lame, if the blacksmith’s daughter failed to fetch a satisfactory dowry, Haggard must have had a hand in it somehow. If you heard one complaint, you heard them all, but the duties of a king dictated that Haggard suffer them. He was about to quit the current stretch of lean-tos and lice-eaten stables when he noticed a peculiar sight on the doorstep of an abandoned house. A tiny bundle of threadbare blankets flanked by a dozen-odd cats. Shooing away the cats, he picked up the bundle to discover a baby lying peacefully therein. Its enormous blue eyes were open, staring inquisitively at him, but it didn’t cry—just stared. The rude little thing…and so small. It was lucky it hadn’t been trod underfoot. Moved by some strange instinct, Haggard brought the child to a wet nurse, who told him that it—a boy—was perfectly healthy for the moment, but wouldn’t last long thus exposed to the elements. He needed a parent’s care, something she was unable to provide. Haggard was about to tell her that he couldn’t very well provide for the child either when their eyes met again. Such strange eyes this baby had—remarkable really, almost fey. They were the exact color of the sea outside the king’s window.

The thought of having children never crossed Haggard’s mind. Yet he suddenly thought of how happy all the families he’d passed there in the village had looked. How wide the fathers’ smiles were, the way the mothers’ eyes shone. Perhaps…perhaps raising this boy would bring him some of that happiness. Besides, a king needed an heir. Haggard was very aware of the fact that he wouldn’t live forever, and it would be good to teach his son the ways of ruling a kingdom. Thanking the wet nurse for her help, he set back out for his castle, the child in his arms. His name would be Lir, and he would be raised a prince.

Raising a child was no easy task. Haggard’s parents being only distant figures in his memory, he had no barometer against which to judge his parenting skills. But Lir grew up well-adjusted enough, and by four years old he was a lively young lad, full of mischief and questions. Haggard had his hands full to be sure, keeping the boy out from under his feet and coming up with suitable answers to his incessant inquiries. It brought him…pleasure. Not quite happiness. Happiness, he suspected, would feel lighter than this. Nothing in his soul lightened, and what remained of his heart did not swell. Yet something in the very back of his mind flared a little brighter when Lir smiled at him or called him “Father”, so Haggard contented himself with that. Until Lir turned six. Then everything changed. Not outwardly—the young prince had reached a more adventurous age, consumed with dreams of errant knighting and slaying dragons. Yet none of these dreams shone on his face, the way they once had. He no longer called Haggard “Father”. And his remarkable, sea-blue eyes no longer glowed with even a fraction of their old fey light. They had become empty and dull. Something in the moldering depths of Haggard’s soul cried out at that, and that bright center of pleasure in the back of his mind was extinguished. He could no longer bear to look at his son.

Fate, however, wasn’t done with him. Having no courtiers to accompany him, Mabruk notwithstanding (a fine figure that doddering old conjurer would cut on a horse!) and Lir being too young, Haggard set out on a hunting by himself one day. Not specifically not to catch any game—although he wouldn’t exactly spurn it, what with his old bones’ insistence that they needed to eat—but more as an excuse to leave the castle for a while. For some reason, the air in that gloomy throne room seemed particularly stuffy and oppressive that day, and he decided he couldn’t bear another moment of it. So he rode until its skeletal parapets and the craggy cliffs that bore them were no longer visible, eventually coming upon a clearing in the woods.

And what a clearing! While the world around it was trapped in autumn’s slow decay, this place was still green and lush, white blossoms lacing the trees and dew sparkling in the grass as if it were still fresh as morning. All around him, there came the snuffling and chittering of various animals and over his head sang birds he didn’t know still existed. It was as though he’d crossed over into some faery vale, where nature itself conformed to completely different laws. Here it was so pure, so untouched by man’s destructive hand, that Haggard had half a mind to leave. Better to leave places like this to their own devices—humans had no business meddling in these things.

His horse had apparently made its mind long before because no sooner did this thought cross his mind than he was thrown from the saddle. He cried out for his horse to come back, but it had already bolted, leaving him sprawled on the ground pondering what to do now. Perhaps it would be best to stay where he was, wait for someone to find him. But who would possibly think to look for him here? Far more likely that he’d be eaten by one of the beasts that lived here—

It was there, beside a cool running stream he’d managed to drag himself to, that he first saw them. The unicorns. Ineffably beautiful in a way no bards could do justice, their snowy pelts glistening, hooves delicate as glass and light of step as a fawn, their crystalline horns casting every conceivable color into the air the way the purest prism might, their manes like spun silver, their very forms so light and seemingly fragile yet betraying such raw power, cooing and whinnying to each other like newborn babes, frolicking about as if they weighed nothing at all, running like the very wind made foam-white flesh…it was too much. They were too much. It was like seeing the face of God…

Staring at them, Haggard noticed that he was laughing. The sensation terrified him so much that he actually pressed two fingers to his wrist to check that his heart had not stopped. It had not. So he allowed himself to laugh more, until hot tears streamed down his cheeks. That feeling that any minute he might be whisked away to the breezes had returned, but this time it was not so terrible. He felt remarkably light, as if a cloud had taken form within him and was causing everything in him to float and his vision to blur. Was this what happiness was like—this exquisite madness, this sense that he had nothing to fear, that the entire world was as pure and bright as this clearing, as the heavenly creatures that stood before him, completely unaware of their effect on him? If so, he wished to never feel anything else ever again. This was enough. He could die now with no regrets, no thought of anything but this place and its glory.

But it was not to be. Through means he could not remember, he ended up leaving the clearing. And almost at once, within sight of the dull sky and cloudy sea that enveloped his castle, the world came crashing back down upon him. The lightness was gone, replaced with an ache that bit deep into every muscle, into the very marrow of his bones. His heart came clattering painfully back into his chest, settling into a senseless, unbearably heavy leaden lump at the bottom of his ribcage, and he wept. It would be the last time in his life he would allow himself to shed tears.

When his eyes were dry again, Haggard realized something even more horrible. His memory of the clearing, the unicorns, was already beginning to fade. No. No, was his first coherent thought—no, he would not let it. If he forgot everything else, if he forgot his own name, he would not forget the unicorns and the joy they had brought him. And he would feel that same joy again, if it was the last thing he did.

But try as he might, he could not capture that joy. He tried everything over the course of many tedious years—great banquets, balls, spectacular performances, outings to the country, the company of women. He came to know them all, and none of them made him happy. They didn’t even capture his interest, and he learned to deal swiftly and harshly with that which lost his interest. In a moment of desperation, he even called Lir and attempted to spend time with him. But that time soured quickly—all he could think of when he met his gaze was the day he stopped calling him “Father” and that flame of pleasure guttered out. So Lir was dismissed, and Haggard returned to his searching. Outside his window, the view began to mirror his own heart—dark, gloomy, and withering, the sea lapping pale and listless at the shore. The once-fertile hills and fields turned to ash, and the very air grew heavy and stale, weighing heavily upon Hagsgate, causing houses to sag miserably and farmers to stoop under loads that had once been light. None of the people came to complain however, which was just as well—he didn’t know what he could possibly do to alleviate it. Better to just let it be.

Another dull stretch of years crawled by, and Haggard could not find the happiness he’d felt so long ago. He could feel himself growing thinner and frailer, and that fear of dissolving into dust on the wind returned with a vengeance. He would die having felt happiness only once in his dreary life. Before he could stop it, an awful hint of despair began intruding upon his all-consuming numbness. One particularly bleak day, Haggard found himself contemplating an old hunting dagger, wondering at the sensation of the cool metal slipping between his ribs. It would be something to feel, he mused, other than this crippling unhappiness. But no. He was not so desperate to feel as to take the coward’s way out. And besides, what sort of world would it be where a king could simply drive a dagger into his own heart? So he endured. What choice did he have?

It was a looking glass, of all things, that granted him the clarity he needed. Lir had said he was looking especially ill that day, and although he’d long since stopped putting stock in the boy’s opinions, Haggard glanced into it anyway. There was nothing there that he wasn’t already aware of—his hair and beard had thinned and whitened, his skin had turned pale, almost grey, from his seclusion, and his cheeks had hollowed until the bones were not only visible, but sharp enough to cut glass. Yet…there was something in his eyes. A curious sheen, as if from tears, reflecting a shimmering glow from the inside. Had it always been there? It couldn’t have been, not as old and cynical as he’d become. Yet here he was—an old and cynical man with the eyes of a child. How long had they been like this…?

Wait. He knew. It was fresh, new—it must only have arrived recently. Could—Could it be that day at the clearing? That day that had transformed his life, had given him a new purpose for spending the rest of his worthless days? Had it changed him in ways he only now understood? Suddenly, he understood why he no longer bore any affection for Lir. Because his eyes that had once held this sheen had become empty. Empty as his own had once been.

As any eyes that never saw unicorns.

It was as though he’d been struck by lightning. The way ahead was clear now—he knew what he now must do. If those creatures were to be his only source of happiness, than he would never be apart from them. Beneath him, the Red Bull roared and tossed against its restraints, shaking the castle to its very foundations. It was time he put that infernal beast to good use. He descended to the cellar, unlocked the Red Bull’s cell, cut its chains with his sword, looked into its terrible eyes and merely said, “I want them.” The Bull snorted once, as if in answer, before tearing off down the tunnel and into the night.

At last his years of searching were coming to fruition. Haggard had spent his entire life in a haze of dim memories and thwarted joy, but no more. Now that dull curtain was parting, and his happiness would never be any farther than the sea. The sea…yes, the unicorns could live there. The Bull would drive them there, and Haggard could look upon them for as long as he lived. And they would be his. Yes…they would be his. He would reclaim his happiness at long, long last.

Yes. His.


End file.
